Episode 79 – Don’t just hire a writer, hire a subject matter expert

My guest on the show today is Michael Greenberg. Michael is the founder of Gentlemen of Technology LLC, a BTB...

The post Episode 79 – Don’t just hire a writer, hire a subject matter expert appeared first on Sideways8.

My guest on the show today is Michael Greenberg. Michael is the founder of Gentlemen of Technology LLC, a BTB venture creation and strategy consulting firm. He launched his first independent venture under the GOT banner, Call for Content, in January of 2017, after almost two years of market research and process development, and currently serves as Chief Strategist and Interviewer.

Adam: [00:05] Hi, and welcome to The Good People, Good Marketing podcast, the podcast about digital marketing and how to make it better so that good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways Eight, a digital marketing agency and 48in48, a nonprofit dedicated to hosting events that build 48 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours.

[00:29] My guest on the show today is Michael Greenberg. Michael is the founder of Gentlemen of Technology LLC, a BTB venture creation and strategy consulting firm. He launched his first independent venture under the GOT banner, Call for Content, in January of 2017, after almost two years of market research and process development, and currently serves as Chief Strategist and Interviewer. Understanding that his knowledge and content development processes are unparalleled, he provides unique insight into growing organizations of all types. Michael, thanks for being on the show. It’s great to have you.

Michael: [01:04] Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Adam: [01:07] With you having the statement about you being the Chief Strategist and Interviewer, I feel like I should be a little bit intimidated since I’m interviewing you, so this should be fun.

Michael: [01:17] Yeah, definitely.

Adam: [01:19] You can tell me what I’m doing well later, and just ignore what I’m doing poorly. That’ll be, we’ll just pretend it doesn’t happen. Well, is there anything you want to add to that bio before we dig in?

Michael: [01:30] I don’t come from a content or marketing background, but I ended up here because I saw a lot of problems.

Adam: [01:39] That’s fair. I think a lot of us end up in marketing trying to do it better than we’ve seen it done in the past. That’s certainly what drew me to it as well. So, that’s great. Well let’s talk about that. Question number one, related to digital marketing. Can you tell me something that’s working well for you?

Michael: [01:55] Content and LinkedIn in particular.

Adam: [02:00] Tell me more about the LinkedIn in particular. You’re one of the rare people that I hear say that.

Michael: [02:04] Yeah. So, I’m a B2B guy through and through, and that means that everyone I work with, even if they’re not really in B2B, has very high value sales. They’re based on relationships and they’re normally talking with people at the executive level. Which means that it’s not going to be one call, it’s going to be in all likelihood, a months long process to secure whatever they’re trying to secure. As a result it means that the content you put out has to work with those people over that time period. I love LinkedIn for that, because LinkedIn has fantastic account based targeting that just does not exist on Facebook anymore.

Adam: [03:00] Gotcha. Do you find that people are still active on LinkedIn? Because my perception of it, and this is just me personally and I’ve got a bias, because I’m just not there a lot, and because I’m not there a lot, I perceived that other people are not there a lot. Which I know is completely flawed and not true. So give me the lowdown, how active is LinkedIn right now?

Michael: [03:21] If you’re in corporate, if you’re in B2B, LinkedIn is probably your most active social network. If you’re in technology, it might be Twitter instead, but you’re still going to find a huge number of people on LinkedIn that are very active there. I was honestly surprised when I first started looking and found out LinkedIn was somewhere I should be working, and then I was surprised again when I saw how few people, especially in small businesses and medium size businesses, just avoid LinkedIn like the plague.

Adam: [03:58] I’ll plead guilty to that. I do avoid LinkedIn like the plague, and hearing you talk, I’m realizing that that may be a mistake that I might have to rectify, so we may have to have some off the side conversations or I may have to do some research after this. So I guess we’ll see.

Michael: [04:11] Yeah.

Adam: [04:12] Well that’s great. I love that. Then the next question related to digital marketing, can you tell us what has not worked well that we can learn from?

Michael: [04:22] Facebook did not work well for me. Especially if you’re selling to any real decision makers, outside of maybe a twenty person business, and selling directly to the CEO of something like that. I have not seen Facebook be effective, just across the board in B2B. And I saw a lot, especially when I started researching into where are the marketing channels, where should I really be putting out content for people. I quickly found out that even though they said Facebook worked really well for B2B, it did not for my markets. I put alongside that, that what I call pop content does not work.

Adam: [05:04] Oh, you got to tell me what pop content means.

Michael: [05:10] It’s entertainment that masquerades as business education. Any of those listicles on business are worthless to you. Any of those things that are telling you this, if somebody can tell you how to make $100,000 in under three-thousand words, they’re either a genius, or they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Adam: [05:40] It’s all those articles that you see that are like how I made twenty million dollars in under thirty days. Those kind of articles?

Michael: [05:47] You know how they did that. They started with a million people in their email list.

Adam: [05:52] That’s right. Or they started with $5,000,000 and then made $20,000,000. That’s great. I like that. I think the way you phrased that is really good. Entertainment that masquerades as business education. I’ve never heard it phrased that way and I think that’s kind of a brilliant statement. I’m going to bold that in my notes. I like that a lot.

Michael : [06:12] I put business books, a lot of nonfiction books that we see today, especially the ones to specifically target the mass market publishers, especially the ones put out by them, are generally bad. They’re a blog post that got turned into a book.

Adam: [06:28] I totally agree. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I like Blinkist, where you can read little book summaries because, I find that a lot of these books that I’ve read in the past really should just be about a fifteen minute read at most, like a white paper and then I can move on long and then if I decided I need to really dig into this, I can actually go buy the book and read it. So it’s pretty great.

Michael: [06:47] I’m a big Blinkist fan as well, especially for those.

Adam: [06:51] Absolutely. You can consume a lot of them very quickly. Get the two main ideas that are actually good out of them, scrap all the rest and move on along, which is fantastic.

Michael: [06:58] Yep.

Adam: [07:00] I love that. Okay. I may have a question going back to LinkedIn really quick. You did mention creating content related to Facebook, creating content related to LinkedIn, are you creating content directly on the platform and publishing there, are you creating content somewhere else and then sharing it there, or when you say create content, do you just mean more like general updates?

Michael: [07:20] All of the above for LinkedIn, though I’ve seen two areas really work well. One is actually writing or posting videos directly to LinkedIn and sharing those, and LinkedIn, because they’re making such a big push to become more of a social platform and to have more content, they really do their best to promote that. And the key thing to remember with all of that is to go mobile. Because almost all the LinkedIn viewers are going to be looking at LinkedIn in between meetings or in between something else, so they’ve got maybe ten, fifteen minutes, and they’re on their phone. And for video that’s particularly important because you want to record in a square or a vertical frame instead.

Adam: [08:09] Okay. Wow, that’s great. I love that.

Michael : [08:11] But also running actual sponsored campaigns on LinkedIn, and using those as branding for a targeted account list, I’ve seen work extremely well.

Adam: [08:23] This sounds more and more interesting and intriguing to me. We’re gonna talk more. This is great. Okay. Then question number three, related to digital marketing, can you tell me something that you are excited about?

Michael: [08:38] I’m actually really excited about LinkedIn video. They’ve only in the past nine months really started to push it, and video ads came out this year. I’m really excited about the direction they’re heading in with that, but beyond that, and beyond LinkedIn in general, I’m really excited about what I’ve seen happening in terms of people understanding the difference between content marketing and SEO, and again to call out a specific group, there’s dozens of SEO firms across the US, and every city has them, that started to re-brand. First as inbound marketing firms and now it’s content marketing firms, and I would not trust a single one of them.

Adam: [09:35] I think there’s some that I trust, but I get where you’re going with that. Yeah, I understand.

Michael: [09:41] If they’re switching that off and the disciplines are radically different from each other in all cases, and it really is a different skill set. I think the best content marketing firms I know come from a journalist background in terms of their content.

Adam: [09:57] I totally understand that. Journalists are going to understand how to, well, really just the whole publishing methodology that you need to think about when you’re doing content marketing, which I think, most of our listeners are not thinking about that. We’re thinking about pieces of content, not strategies around content as a whole. I think that’s great. Let me see if I can recap a little bit of our discussion here and then you can add, any of your final thoughts as you like. For question number one, what has worked well for, you, you mentioned content works well. I totally agree with you on that. LinkedIn is working particularly well and you said it’s fantastic for account based targeting specifically brand campaigns that are targeted to very specific lists, which is again fantastic information. He said it’s a great opportunity for corporate and B2B. A lot of corporate people there, a lot of B2B people are there. And writing or posting videos directly on LinkedIn is getting a lot of attention because LinkedIn wants to promote their platform as a legitimate option for a social network.

[11:00] For question number two, what has not worked well that we can learn from? He said Facebook did not work well for you. It might’ve worked well when selling to very small companies of twenty people or under or maybe targeting the CEO, but in general did not work well. Also, pop content doesn’t work well. You called that entertainment that masquerades as business education, which is probably the favorite phrase I’m going to hear all week long, so that was pretty amazing. Thank you for that. And Pop business books that are written for the general mass market that really are not very helpful and I agree with you there. Let’s just get a Blinkist subscription and call it good. And for question number three, what are you excited about? You’re excited about LinkedIn video and what they’re doing to promote that and that people are beginning to understand the difference between content marketing and SEO. Is there anything that I left off in my notes there?

Michael: [11:49] No, but I do have something that I think is worthwhile to add. We live in a world where you can actually hire freelancers very easily, and you can hire freelancers that are subject matter experts in whatever you’re trying to create content on. Don’t just hire a writer, hire a subject matter expert. Somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about, and hire a journalist, a freelance journalist, and have the journalist write the article based on an interview from the subject matter expert.

Adam: [12:25] That’s really, really smart. You’re talking about hiring them. Do you have a specific platform that you like to use for that?

Michael: [12:33] I’m a big fan of FreeeUp these days, for finding good talent in many categories. But for subject matter experts, I go on LinkedIn, and I search for somebody because there’s normally somebody who’s an expert in their field, who’s not creating any content because they don’t know how and they will be happy if you pay him fifty bucks an hour to sit down with your person and just get interviewed.

Adam: [13:01] That’s kind of brilliant. I really love that. That’s really smart. Never would have occurred to me to go find the person, not the expert, not creating content, have them chat up a journalist, and have the journalist create this amazing piece of content. I never would have put that together. I love that. I take that back, that’s the best thing you said today. Forget that entertainment that masquerades as business mess. All right. Well Michael, this was really great. I really appreciate your time today and thanks for joining me on the show.

Michael: [13:30] Yeah, anytime.

Adam: [13:35] Thanks for listening to The Good People, Good Marketing podcast. To get more resources about digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com, where you can find more podcasts, blogs, and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me your host, you can find me on twitter @AJWalker and all my blog at adamjwalker.com, where I blog about leadership, productivity, habit building and the craziness of having five kids. Thanks and tune in next time.

The post Episode 79 – Don’t just hire a writer, hire a subject matter expert appeared first on Sideways8.